New Study – Adult Perceptions of Black Girls

Interesting study. Adults are likely to see black girls as more mature then they are, and in less need of support and nurturing…

Not sure why this is a surprise, as it seems that some of our sick population has a hard time seeing black children as even human.

 

Adults view black girls as ‘less innocent,’ new report says

When compared with their white peers, young black girls are viewed less as children and more like adults, according to a new research report.

Adults in the United States tend to view black girls as “less innocent” and more grown up than white girls, according to the report, which published by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality on Tuesday.

Based on those findings, the research suggests that adults may perceive that black girls need less nurturing and protection than white girls, which could influence how black girls are treated in the education or juvenile justice systems.

“If our public systems, such as schools and the juvenile justice system, view black girls as older and less innocent, they may be targeted for unfair treatment in ways that effectively erase their childhood,” said Rebecca Epstein, lead author of the report and executive director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality.

She added that disparities in how black girls are viewed emerge as early as age 5, when some children are still in preschool.

“Our finding that adultification begins as young as the age of 5 was particularly sobering. That means that adults may even see little girls in kindergarten differently, needing less nurturing and support than their white peers,” Epstein said.

“Yet at the same time, the more general confirmation that black girls are adultified was not surprising. Scholars and researchers have observed this phenomenon for years,” she said. “Many experts have observed that stereotypes of black women, especially the stereotype of the ‘angry black woman,’ are projected onto black girls, and that black girls’ behavior is often interpreted as threatening to adults’ authority, which effectively adultifies black girls in harmful ways.”…More...

 

Why Black Children Run Away From Home…

Yeah, a lot of black children run away from home or go missing. One of the reasons the Police and media don’t take it as seriously as they could is this…

Many of these children have reasons to run away.

Want to keep black kids from running away from home? Stop hitting them.

We need to pay attention to the home lives that missing kids are fleeing from.

Last month, a rumor that more than 500 mostly black and Latino children from the District of Columbia had been abducted and sold into sex slavery went viral on social media. A new decision by D.C. police to alert the public whenever children were reported missing had backfired; most of the kids had been found safe within 24 hours, but those updates never spread as far as the initial reports. Worried people, from the Congressional Black Caucus to LL Cool J, raised alarms over what looked like a sudden epidemic that was being ignored in ways that would be unimaginable with white children.

Hoping to quell the outrage, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser assured the public that there has been no surge of missing kids. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t children that need our help,” she said March 24 as she unveiled plans to create a task force to work with vulnerable teenagers.

Hundreds of children of color have been reported missing in D.C. at some point since January, but those numbers aren’t higher than usual. The police say 2,242 children were reported missing in 2016, down from 2,433 in 2015. Virtually all of them were found unharmed within 24 hours; in many cases the children, who showed no evidence of being exploited by sex traffickers, had repeatedly run away from home, according to a spokesman for the mayor.

Which means many children do indeed need our help — and we need to pay more attention to the home lives that they might be running away from.

Rates of reported child abuse are disproportionately high for black children. According to the Justice Department , black children ages 12 to 19 are “three times more likely to be victims of reported child abuse or neglect.” As many as 7,354 young people ages 12 to 24, most of them black, experience homelessness each year in D.C., and more than 2 million children nationwide do. In one national survey, nearly half reported intense conflict, neglect or physical harm by a family member as a major factor in their homelessness. Others experienced family instability due to unaffordable housing, or left the juvenile-justice system or the foster-care system without enough education or support to make it on their own. Research from the Administration for Children and Families shows that up to 42 percent of runaway and homeless youth are sexually abused before they leave their homes.

Black children are also disproportionately likely to suffer treatment at home that’s so bad that they want to flee. In 2015, black kids had the highest rate of abuse and neglect, at 14.5 per 1,000 children, compared with 8.1 per 1,000 for white children, according to the Children’s Bureau, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. More than 3,600 black children in the United States have died as a result of maltreatment in the past decade, a rate three times higher than for all other racial groups. Suicide rates among elementary-age black children have nearly doubled since the 1990s, while the rates for white children have fallen, according to a 2015 report from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A disturbing number of children in D.C. and elsewhere are gambling that life on the street could not be worse than their abusive homes. I made the same choice in 1987 and in 1991 while growing up in Trenton, N.J.

I ran away from my adoptive family when I was 9 and again when I was 12. After the second time, I refused to go back, and I ended up yet another black child in New Jersey’s foster-care system. A warm bed and steady meals in my adoptive home were not worth constant “whuppings” and verbal abuse — which my adoptive parents and the wider black community said were love, discipline and protection from the police or white racists. I felt safer on my own, even if that meant living on the street. From age 12 to 14, I was shuttled between foster homes, youth shelters and group homes, until I was fortunate enough to win an academic scholarship to the Lawrenceville Prep School. So I understand where many of these kids are coming from.

My own experiences helped shape my role as an advocate for children, and it’s painful to see how common such abuse still is in my community. Without question, the toughest part of my work is convincing black people that a “no hitting” zone at home is crucial to helping children feel and be safe. Whupping kids is not “a black thing.” But parents argue that without whuppings, their children will end up in prison, even though we’ve been having national conversations about mass incarceration for decades. They cherry-pick Old Testament scriptures to justify hitting. They argue that there’s a difference between spanking and abuse, as if a child’s body experiences pain differently based on what parents call a swat or the intent behind it. And many people proclaim that they were whupped as children and “turned out fine,” even though they’ve grown up to see striking a child’s body as normal behavior. It’s a violent, unnecessary parenting practice planted in our culture through colonialism, slavery, forced indoctrination into Christianity and centuries of racial trauma.

If we are going to talk about missing children in D.C., we must look at beating kids as one of the root issues. Yes, sex trafficking does happen, and yes, the types of children who go missing in Washington and other cities — mostly black; mostly poor; disproportionately lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer — are more vulnerable than other kids. But neglect and abuse are among the most commonfactors.

So much of our national focus on black children is on how “bad” they are: how they need more physical punishment, zero tolerance at school, harsh sentences from the courts. They are blamed for their own deaths at the hands of adults who claimed they were afraid of them. That systemic devaluation of black children even extends into classrooms. In 19 states, students are still subject to corporal punishment; a disproportionately higher number of black children receive it. According to reports by the Education Department’s office of civil rights and Human Rights Watch, racial bias contributes to this problem, along with black parents signing opt-in forms empowering teachers and administrators to hit their children.

These messages have consequences. When black children are constantly told that they are a problem, that they are unworthy and undeserving of empathy and kindness, that they can be beaten in schools, in the streets, by cops and by the people who love them, running away from home doesn’t seem like such an extreme choice. If home so often isn’t a safe haven, should we be surprised?…Read the Rest Here…

 

 

How Bad are Charter Schools?

John Oliver’s rant –

 

Dealing With Segregation in NYC

In actuality, the most segregated school systems in America are in the Northern Big Cities. Hyper-segregation at the neighborhood level leads to segregated schools. This enforces, and supports different outcomes for black and white children. While black kids certainly don’t need white kids around to learn…It seems far too many school administrators and teachers need white kids around to teach.

Why Liberal New York City’s Schools Are Among the Nation’s Most Segregated

 

New York City’s public schools are among the most segregated in the country – a fact that flies in the face of the city’s history as a bastion of progressivism. For this podcast, I spoke with former ProPublica reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, now a New York Times Magazine staff writer, about her decision to delve deeply and personally into that paradox.

Hannah-Jones wrote about the public school her daughter attends in New York City, PS 307. The school is populated by poor children of color from nearby housing projects. It also became the site of community tension when predominantly white and well-off parents living nearby were pushed into its school zone to ease crowding at another school.

Hannah-Jones has spent much of the past four years chronicling how official actions and policies perpetuate racial and economic segregation in our nation’s housing and schools. For this story, she focused on the painful choices she and other parents have to make in the absence of official efforts to right past wrongs.

On why she decided to write a personal story about her family’s experience in a school already in the headlines:

Hannah-Jones: I just felt that there was a story that wasn’t being told. That a lot of the history and, understandably, because newspaper reporters, as in TV reporters, have very short time to turn around something, they don’t have a lot of space. They have to move on to other things. I felt like we were writing about all of these tensions and this difficulty without giving any context about why we were here, and what was making this so hard, and why, in this very liberal city, we were grappling race no better than anywhere else.

About her struggle with deciding to allow her daughter’s photograph to be on the cover of The New York Times Magazine:

Hannah-Jones: In the end, I thought, if they can see this little girl, a girl that they can relate to more for class reasons, or for whatever reasons, will they then be able to finally relate to all these children who are suffering for our decisions? Who adults are making decisions for and about, and putting them in situations they don’t deserve. Ultimately, that was the reason why I finally said, “Okay.” I felt the small sacrifice of her anonymity as worth it if people could make a connection to all of these other children through her.

On why she chose the chilling end to her piece that she did:

Hannah-Jones: I needed to end with a gut punch, really. I needed to end with something that would stick with you, and you wouldn’t walk away from this story feeling like, ‘Yeah. This was really sad, but whatever.’ It was really important for me to end with that – in the end bring it back to the reality that all these 10,000 words are about these children.

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher. For more, read Hannah-Jones’ piece Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.

 

 

Pre-School Is Where the Hatred Is

The School to Prison pipeline begins early…

Black preschool kids still get suspended much more frequently than white preschool kids

Schools suspend minority students at much higher rates than their peers, sometimes starting from the beginning — preschool.

The Civil Rights Data Collection, a national survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, surveyed over 50 million students at more than 95,000 schools and found that while suspensions decreased by almost 20 percentage points between the 2011-2012 and 2013-2014 school years, gaps between the suspension rates of different groups of students remained, according to results released late Monday.

The survey included 1,439,188 preschool students enrolled in 28,783 schools. Of those,6,743 preschool students or .47% were suspended out of school once or more than once. While black girls represent 20 percent of preschool enrollment, 54 percent of preschool girls suspended once or more were black. And black preschool children overall were 3.6 times as likely to be suspended as young white children.

The results don’t “paint a very good picture,” said Liz King, senior policy analyst and director of education policy at the Leadership for Civil and Human Rights. She called parts of it “startling.”

Across all grades, 2.8 million students were suspended once or more than once. Black students were nearly four times as likely to be suspended and almost twice as likely to be expelled as white students. Students with disabilities were also twice as likely to be suspended as general education students.

The disparity “tears at the moral fabric of the nation,” said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr. “We will not compromise away the civil right of all students to an excellent education.”

The findings come amid a major nationwide debate over school discipline, and just what statistics like these mean.

School districts across the country have reexamined the way they chastise students for misbehaving, in part because of previous civil rights survey results.

In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for “willful defiance.” As a result, the district’s suspension rate dropped to .55 percent last school year from eight percent in 2007-2008. Instead, teachers were supposed to use “restorative justice,” tactics that include conflict resolution, to keep their classrooms orderly. But teachers have saidthat they haven’t been trained in these techniques sufficiently.

Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, a new law, states are required to review schools disciplinary statistics to reduce an “overuse of suspension.”

The disparities invite further investigation, said Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary of education responsible of the Office for Civil Rights. “Data by itself is not a reason to think there’s intentional discrimination, but they are a reason to ask further questions,” she said.

So why are there major disparities in school discipline?

Jason Okonofua, a social psychologist at Stanford University, began trying to answer this question in his research after reflecting on his own experiences. As a kid growing up in Memphis, Tenn., he attended seven different public schools and noticed that in some schools, teachers were more rigid; in others, they were more supportive. After tenth grade, though, came a bigger difference: he won a scholarship to an East coast prep school, where he was one of just several black kids, compared to the majority black schools he attended in Memphis.

At the prep school, he said, teachers treated students like adults. “Seeing how different school atmospheres can bring about different outcomes got me interested in this particular topic,” he said.

Okonofua found in his studies that the disparities stem from problems in the relationships between teachers and students. Minority students, he found, expect to be the victim of bias — which leads them to be less cooperative. On the other hand, he said, if a teacher feels disrespected, and as if the student is a troublemaker, the student will get punished more severely, causing the cycle to continue….More…

 

Alabama Teacher’s Racist Assignment

Hard to believe this guy wasn’t smart enough to realize he was going to get fired for this…

 

Alabama teacher busted for assigning ‘math test’ based on 30-year-old racist meme

A Middle school teacher in Mobile, Alabama was placed on leave for the remainder of the school year after a student revealed their use of a “math test” replete with racist stereotypes, AL.com reported on Tuesday.

The unidentified teacher assigned their class at Burns Middle School a version of a document known online as the “L.A. Math Proficiency Test.” It first came to light afterWALA-TV reported that one student took a picture of the assignment, then showed it to his mother, Erica Hall.

Hall then raised the issue with Burns officials.

The version of the “test” spotted at Burns was nearly identical to the one distributed online, with only minor changes to differentiate it. For example, one question stated:

Leroy has 2 ounces of cocaine and he sells an 8-ball to Antonio for $320 and 2 grams to Juan for $85 per gram. What is the street value of the rest of his hold?

According to Snopes, the original “math test” has been spotted online since the mid 1990s, and was allegedly available in hard copy form since the 1980s. The questions revolve around topics like drug dealing, “pimping,” and drive-by shootings.

 

New Documentary on Rosenwald Schools

The history of black education in America is difficult to separate from the legacy of the Rosenwald Schools. Julius Rosenwald, who rose to be President of Sears and Roebucks, charity built nearly 5,000 schools in the segregated South for black children. Black parents paid a “double tax” to get the schools built and operated in the 14 states of the South, as on top of their normal state and local taxes, they had to raise and donate about 14% of the cost of the school – which I will detail in the second article below.

Julius Rosenwald, center, started the Rosenwald Fund to help build schools in the segregated South. “Rosenwald” is a new documentary by filmmaker Aviva Kempner.

Rosenwald’s generosity captured in new film

In age that exalts politicians and entertainers who can’t stop telling us how wonderful they are, it is refreshing to honor a man who accomplished a lot without wanting his name on all of it.

Julius Rosenwald, who never finished high school but rose to become president and co-owner of Sears, Roebuck and Co., didn’t want his name on the store that he led to worldwide success.

Rosenwald, who died in 1932, didn’t want his name on Chicago’s magnificent Museum of Science and Industry, although he funded and promoted it so much that many Chicagoans called it “the Rosenwald museum” anyway.

He didn’t want his name on his other edifices, including more than 5,000 schools that he helped fund for black schoolchildren across the segregated South.

Yet, alumni of those schools still call them “the Rosenwald schools.” I know. Some of those alumni are in my family.

I discovered that tidbit of family information in the way journalists often stumble across information about themselves while pursuing stories about somebody else.

I was being interviewed by Washington, D.C., filmmaker Aviva Kempner for her new documentary, “Rosenwald,” when she asked if any of my southern relatives, most of them in Alabama, attended Rosenwald schools. I didn’t know, I said, but it was possible. I have a lot of cousins.

I later asked my cousin Willie Howard, a whiz in the telecommunications industries, and he broke out in a big grin. “We all did,” he said.

Alumni more famous than my cousins include poet-author Maya Angelou, director George C. Wolfe, U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, all of whom are interviewed in the film.

Indeed, Kempner’s “Rosenwald,” now in select theaters, may well leave you convinced that former United States poet laureate Rita Dove, another Rosenwald school alum, was right when she called the Rosenwald Fund “the single most important funding agency for African-American culture in the 20th century.”

Besides underwriting the mostly rural grade schools, the Rosenwald Fund awarded fellowships to such rising stars as classical vocalist Marian Anderson, poet Langston Hughes, painter Jacob Lawrence, photographer Gordon Parks and writers James Baldwin, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison.

The most intriguing question, among the many that the film explores, is why Rosenwald, whose father immigrated from Germany in 1851 with $20 in his pocket, was so modest yet so generous.

As the late civil rights leader Julian Bond, whose father and uncle were Rosenwald fellows, puts it in the film, “He did not have to care about black people, but he did.”

The answer, Rosenwald’s biographers say, can be found in his faithfulness to the Jewish ideals of “tzedakah” (charity) and “tikkun olam” (repairing the world).

According to Stephanie Deutsch, author of the 2011 book “You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South,” Rosenwald said in one of his speeches that “We like to look down on the Russians because of the way they treat the Jews, and yet we turn around, and the way we treat our African-Americans is not much better.”

Rosenwald was also influenced by Booker T. Washington, conservative founder of the Tuskegee Institute, who suggested the funding of schools as the best investment for the future of black America.…More…

 

Rosenwald Schools

By: Dr. Alyce Miller, associate professor of history at John Tyler Community College and Dr. Brian J. Daugherity, assistant professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University

The Rosenwald school building program, in many ways the brainchild of Virginia-born and Hampton-educated Booker T. Washington, occurred during the period of segregation and Jim Crow across the American South. Segregated school systems were supposed to be, according to the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), “separate and equal,” but in reality educational systems for African Americans in Virginia and the South were anything but. This made the funds provided by educational grant programs such as the Rosenwald Fund so significant.

Rosenwald schools were public schools that were built using matching grant funds. The Rosenwald Fund required matching funds from any combination of public and private sources. According to Julius Rosenwald Fund records (JRF), the JRF helped construct 367 schools, three teacher’s homes, and eleven school (industrial) shops in Virginia. Of the total cost of Rosenwald-associated buildings, grounds, and equipment in Virginia from 1917 through 1932, African Americans contributed 22%, white contributions totaled 1%, the Rosenwald Fund contributed 15%, and state and local government contributions equaled 62%. In the fifteen states in the South where the school building program operated, African Americans collectively contributed 17% of the funds, the Rosenwald Fund contributed 15% of the funds, private white contributions totaled 4% of the funds, and public funds made up the remaining 64% of the funds. Without the organization of local African American communities willing to pay what historian James D. Anderson referred to as the “double tax,” these schools would not have been built.

In late Fall 2015, VCU Special Collections will launch an online exhibit, Black Education in Goochland County: From Rosenwald Schools through Brown v. Board of Education, comprised of research and oral history interviews related to African American educational activism in Virginia and, specifically, Goochland County. The interviews and research were conducted by Dr. Alyce Miller, Dr. Brian Daugherity, and Cris Silvent, associate professor of art at John Tyler Community College.

The local activism surrounding Rosenwald schools continues today in movements throughout the Commonwealth to preserve the histories, and structures, of these schools. John Tyler Community College (and the Virginia Community College system) has been working on an initiative to increase student engagement and success using student and faculty involvement in Rosenwald school activities. The excitement and commitment surrounding this activism provides us with an opportunity to engage the younger generation in this history and in education in general. We have also partnered with Preservation Virginia (among others) to create a larger network of Rosenwald school information across the Commonwealth.

In today’s featured image, you can see the number of Rosenwald schools built in counties throughout Virginia. You can find more information on the number of schools built in each county in Virginia (and throughout the South) by accessing the Rosenwald Schools Database at Fisk University. This is available online here. Schools were not often named after Julius Rosenwald, at his own request.

This short documentary (not the one Paige discusses above) is about the restoration of the Russell School in North Carolina

 

Resegregation and Purposely Failing Schools for Black Kids -Pinellas County, Florida

This one is jaw dropping. A County in FLorida which intentionally voted to re-segregate schools, and then intentionally denied basic benefits to the newly created poor schools.

This one is the New Jim Crow.

This Florida School District Is Failing Black Students at a Shocking Rate. That’s Exactly What It Chose to Do.

Last week, the Tampa Bay Times published a report of its sobering yearlong investigation of the Pinellas County School District, which is home to five of the worst elementary schools in the state, despite the county’s relative affluence. The school crisis in Pinellas County—on Florida’s west coast on Tampa Bay—is a familiar story of court-ordered integration followed in short order by devastatingly thorough resegregation.

But what happened in Pinellas offers an even more dramatic cautionary tale, and not just because the changes have taken place so precipitously: Just eight years ago, the school district voted to ditch integration by ending busing and reinstituting a “neighborhood schools” policy that amounted to de facto segregation. In the years since, the five elementary schools spotlighted went from good to middle-of-the-road to homogenously awful. One school that had had an “A” rating is now the second worst elementary school in the entire state of Florida. Students are failing at eye-popping rates, with 8 out of 10 kids failed at reading, and 9 out of 10 in math. Altogether 95 percent of black students are failing reading or math at these schools, which the story memorably labels “failure factories.” See also this powerful graphic account of “Why Pinellas County is the worst place in Florida to be black and go to public school.”

So what went wrong? Is it simply that Pinellas County—in particular the southern part of its largest city, St. Petersburg, which has been predominantly black since the 1930s, when discriminatory housing policies ghettoized minorities there—is afflicted with an irreparably poor, damaged student population? Not at all, and that’s precisely why this story is so disgusting, and so important. As the piece points out, while “there are places in Florida where deep generational poverty, runaway crime and rampant drug use make educating children an extremely difficult task,” Pinellas County isn’t one of them.

Statewide, Pinellas County is right in the middle when it comes to poverty rates, median household income, college graduation rates, and single-parent homes. More from the Times:

Poverty doesn’t explain Pinellas’ problems. One hundred eighty-four elementary schools are as poor or poorer than Pinellas’ worst schools. All but seven outperformed the Pinellas schools in reading and math.

The rate of failure in the five elementary schools is unlike anything that occurs elsewhere in Florida.

The reporters make a very convincing case that the kids in Pinellas are failing not because, as the school board members would have it, they’re trapped in a “cycle of poverty” but because the school district is setting them up for failure with at best do-nothing and at worst malevolent policies.

When the board voted to resegregate in December 2007, it vowed to pour more resources into what would become overnight-majority-poor and -black schools: more counselors and social workers, beefed-up after-school and summer programs. It did none of these things. Funding was erratic, and unlike other districts with high-poverty schools that have made efforts to invest in minority students (a computer tracking program in Broward County, a teacher-incentive bonus of up to $20,000 in Duval County), the Pinellas County board just shrugged off the plummeting scores and skyrocketing reports of behavior problems, and actively ended any attempts at intervention. More than half of teachers in the five schools requested transfers out in 2014, and some classes had up to 12 different teachers in a single year. The teachers who stayed were often the most inept and inexperienced.

Even after community calls for change, the school board members continued to attribute the abysmal state of their county’s black schools to the “cycle of poverty,” absent any influence from them.  “This is a nationwide thing, not just us,” the piece quotes school board member Peggy O’Shea, who voted for resegregation in 2007 and continues to defend her stance today, as saying. You get a good sense of her sympathies when she goes on to say, “We only talk about it in black schools, but we resegregated white schools as well.”…

.

 

Black Children Less Likely to be Treated for Pain in ER

Following on to a number of medical studies the last few years – How race impacts treatment and outcomes…

The pont here being 4 times more black children die due to lack of pre- and post natal care in their first year of life…

Than in all the drive bys by all the so called “Street pirates” in all the cities in the country.

Sp…Why are people abetting this?

Black Children Less Likely to Get Pain Meds in ER

Black children seen in the emergency department for abdominal pain are less likely to receive pain medication than white children, according to a new study.

The research, which also found that black and Hispanic children were more likely to experience an ER stay longer than six hours compared to white children — even when the same tests were ordered — raises questions on how race may affect hospital care when it comes to the youngest patients.

The study was presented Saturday at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Boston.

Lead study author Dr. Tiffani J. Johnson, pediatric emergency medicine fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, says she has a strong interest in improving the quality and equity of care that kids receive in the ER.

“If we don’t recognize disparities, we’re never going to be able to close the gaps,” says Johnson.

Johnson and colleagues used data from the CDC’s National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which included more than 2,000 children from 550 hospitals who visited the ER for abdominal pain between 2006 and 2009.

Black children were 39 percent less likely to receive pain medications compared to white children with similar medical situations. When their pain was severe, rated 7 or higher on a pain scale from 0 to 10, an even larger disparity was observed.

Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston, a pediatrician and co-director of The Gaston and Porter Health Improvement Center in Potomac, Md., has dedicated much of her professional career to improving the health of poor and minority families.

She said the study’s findings are an essential step towards achieving equality in health care and the focus on kids is especially important.

“Every study like this one gives us more and more information,” says Gaston. “We have to dispel stereotypes and assumptions that interfere with care.”

Children are always at greater risk to be undertreated or mistreated compared to adults because of their limited ability to communicate how they feel. Anything else that negatively impacts their care would be important to identify so that providers can be educated.

So what factors are to blame for this problem? Little is known about pain expression and perception in children, but the issue has been studied extensively in adults.

Past research has shown that race can affect the way that adults express their pain. A 2002 study published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations found that black patients were less likely to disclose the fact that they were in pain than their white counterparts. When they did discuss their pain they were less likely to describe its intensity.

And doctors might also be less skilled in recognizing the pain of certain races. Specifically, doctors were almost twice as likely to underestimate the pain of black patients compared to other ethnicities in a 2007 study from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine.

Whether either of these findings applies to pain in children is simply not known. Johnson says we need additional studies to find out exactly what factors lead to variations in care.

“Now we need to look at where these differences are coming from,” says Johnson. “Are they at the patient level, the parent level or the physician level?”

In the meantime, Johnson says, her study’s findings offer an important reminder to doctors.

“I hope that providers caring for children will recognize this,” she says, “and make efforts to ensure they are proving appropriate pain control for children of all ethnicities.”

 

Adopt a “Real” Black Baby!

Oooooooookidokie!

 

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Discovered REAL BLACK BABIES via gethehelloffmylawn
Follow my videos on vodpod

 

 

Bad News for Black Conservatives…

Bad news for the “blame black folks” set…

Poor white pupils lag behind black peers

White schoolchildren in Britain’s poorest communities lag behind peers who are black or of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, a Financial Times analysis of more than 3m sets of exam results reveals.

Poor white children even achieve worse average results than deprived pupils for whom English is a second language.

The average black pupil from among the poorest fifth of children, identified by postcode analysis, gains the equivalent of one more GCSE pass at A*, the highest grade, than the average white child from a similar background.

Follow the link to read the rest.